1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to information technology, and more particularly to a method for providing information to devices attached to an information infrastructure.
2. Description of Related Art
Administrators of information technology (IT) infrastructures may maintain registration information databases of equipment that are attached to the IT infrastructure. The registration information can be used in various ways, such as to evaluate the security of equipment and to track assets for tax purposes and compliance with privacy laws. However, if the registration database does not have complete information for all of the devices in the system, it may be difficult to identify the devices for which information is needed. For example, a relatively large business can have 100,000 to 500,000 devices that are each attached by an internet protocol (IP) to an internal IT infrastructure. The IT infrastructure administrators may not be able to identify the entity with control over a particular unregistered device in order to request that registration information be provided.
It may be difficult to communicate any information to the device, such as to request that registration be sent to an IT administrator. For example, in some cases, a communication may be received from an unregistered device. The communication may identify the IP address of the device, but it may contain little, if any, other identifying information. In an effort to find the device and/or entity with control over the device, the communication may be traced along a physical wire from the last known router, which can be identified using router tracing commands. The tracing of such communications may be problematic if the termination point of the wire and/or the device is in a security restricted space. Moreover, tracing a communication may not be practical in an environment with a relatively large number of devices.